Lucy Prebble isn’t what I expected. How can I put this without sounding unspeakably chauvinist? The young female playwright responsible for the era-defining, must-see theatrical event of 2009 had become, in my mind’s eye, a woman of very serious substance. You don’t produce a show as authoritative as Enron without being a stickler for detail. I anticipated brainy and, yes, formidably intense.

But Prebble turns out to be, one establishes within moments of meeting her, fun. Focused? Sure. Smart? No question: she talks rapidly, fluently and knowledgeably about her chosen specialism – the art of turning the scandalous collapse of the American energy giant Enron into a drama for our times, one full of darkness, insanity and excess. One might have guessed from Enron’s light-touch flourishes that its author had a sense of humour but in person, wearing a multi-coloured polka-dot dress, she’s as bubbly as a newly uncorked champagne-bottle on bankers’ bonus-day. Whereas most of us are sunk in gloom at the global financial collapse, Prebble, 29, exudes the buoyancy of youth and a nicely unsimulated wonderment at her success.

Maybe it’s no surprise to find her in such high spirits. The show has been a sell-out smash at both the Minerva in Chichester and the Royal Court. And now it’s poised for the West End. “I really didn’t see that coming,’ she says. “I just didn’t think it was marketable in that way.”

She looks back to the end of the last decade, when she was studying for an English degree at Sheffield. “If someone had said: 'You will have a play in the West End in 10 years’ time’, I wouldn’t have believed them. That, to me, meant Pinter or The Weir – a school-trip sort of thing.’

Prebble grew up in Haslemere, Surrey, and attended Guildford High School for Girls. Her mother worked in state education as a bursar, her father was a middle manager in an IT company. Her older brother and sister would go on to work for big consultancy firms. This background is fairly crucial in helping to understand why she was so intrigued by the Enron story, and unintimidated by the scale of research required to trace in detail the company’s labyrinthine route to disaster.

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For a time after graduating, she wavered over whether to join the clan in a “proper job”. Resolving to a make a go of creative writing for a while, it wasn’t until she found herself temping at the National Theatre, reading scripts and deciding she could do better than some, that the playwriting bug took hold. She enrolled on the Royal Court Young Writers programme – and the result, in 2003, was The Sugar Syndrome, a powerful portrait of the friendship between a convicted male paedophile and an inquisitive teenage girl. Only 22, Prebble was already a name to watch.

The gestation period for her follow-up, though, was agonisingly long. She can laugh about it now: “It took many, many drafts. I’m a bit of a perfectionist. There was a stage about four years ago when people stopped asking me about it because it was getting a bit embarrassing.”

The trick, she discovered, was forbidding herself to do any more research and going back to gut instincts.

“For example, you could do as much research about the Lehman Brothers as possible, but the important thing was that I had this child-like idea of them as Siamese twins. It’s those original, slightly infantile responses to business that are worth clinging on to – because they’re the things audiences can relate to.”

With the staunch support of the Headlong theatre company and its artistic director Rupert Goold to rely on, she soldiered on, at once distracting and supporting herself with a foray into television, scripting the first series of Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007), an adaptation of the Belle de Jour blog starring Billie Piper. Given how long the play absorbed her attention, I wondered, did she foresee the financial meltdown?

“I’d love that to be true,” she says. “There were moments when I’d read articles about Enron and the journalist would ask: 'What’s changed?’ and the interviewee would go: 'Nothing!’ And I’d think: 'That’s strange – either this is an extraordinary occurrence that happened because a group of men behaved abnormally or there’s something more endemic going on.’ I’d be a liar to say I saw the credit crunch coming, though.”

Right up to the first preview, she couldn’t decide whether her efforts would be rewarded or jeered out of the theatre. “Sam West would be rehearsing his bit and then some actors would come on and do a barbershop quartet. It was such a mishmash of forms as a show, we felt it was either going to be so ridiculous that people would laugh at us or they were going to go: 'Oh, this heralds something new!’”

Audiences and critics swiftly responded to Enron with huge enthusiasm and stylistically it stood in refreshing contrast to David Hare’s quasi-verbatim response to capitalism’s annus horribilis, The Power of Yes. Prebble hasn’t checked out the rival show – yet.

“Various newspapers asked me to see it and write what I thought but I’d got tired of economics. I’d spent years of my life on it. You could say I was Robert Pestoned out!”

She needs to galvanise herself once again. A Broadway run is scheduled for May – and there’s now a film version in the pipeline. She admits to being apprehensive about how it will go down in America.

“I hope it still comes across in the spirit in which it was conceived. It’s not finger-wagging or condemnatory. It’s supposed to be a trip inside a financial bubble – and then the bubble bursts.”

Has Enron changed her life? “It has changed the nature of the work I’m offered. I’m now offered the sort of TV and film jobs you might offer a successful middle-aged male writer – things about business and government, big weighty subject matter. That’s thrilling. Financially I haven’t seen a big change yet – although everyone keeps talking to me as though I will do.” She smiles: “So I’m looking forward to that!”